Here’s the quote of the day from Oracle President Mark Hurd:

Taleo is completely additive to Oracle Fusion HCM.

Additive? So Taleo will improve the flavor of Oracle Fusion?

Here’s another one from Hurd:

Oracle is the leader in the enterprise cloud.

So what do these two comments from Hurd say about the Taleo acquisition?

Nothing.

That’s the extent of it. Oracle had nothing to say today about what its $1.9 billion bought.

As Dennis Howlett said on Twitter:

Oracle is pulling off a trick I thought impossible – making SAP look exciting

What else is there to say  here?  Here’s the marketing, err, statements from Oracle:

Services Angle

There is nothing in this news that gives any confidence that Oracle will pursue a deep services strategy with Taleo under its umbrella.

Are we going to see Taleo get gutted, mashed and extracted into a syrup as an additive to Oracle Fusion? That’s the Oracle way for its acquisitions. Hurd may have not meant to signal this but the lack of any vision for Taleo provides some reason to speculate about Taleo’s future.

The webcast signals an opportunity for Workday and SAP through its acquisition of Success Factors. Taleo does significant volume through its SaaS platform. Mark Smith of Vendatta Research wrote an excellent analysis of the company and what can be expected with it becoming part of Oracle. He writes that Taleo has provided statistics showing that 15 percent of all new hires flow through Taleo applications. The company says Taleo accounts for 74 million transactions per day and has 240 million candidates in the Taleo Talent Exchange.  You can bet that Oracle will extract every last drop out of the Taleo funnel and pour it into its Fusion product.  Also see Howlett’s post today. Dennis is one of the leading analysts in the HCM space.

Hurd says Oracle is the leader in the enterprise cloud. Last I checked middleware does not mean cloud. But really who cares? Oracle calls everything cloud that it once called on-premise. So of course it is the leader in the cloud!

All the Oracle cloud needs now is more syrup.